Modes of Expressing Ideas
8. Modes of Expressing Ideas. It is important for the comprehension of discourse to dwell upon the various modes of expressing ideas, and the peculiar advantages and disadvantages of lan¬guage as a medium of expression. When a landscape is spread before the eye, we re¬ceive impressions of form, relation, color and motion. These, united into a complex whole, give to the mind a conception of the landscape. Now let the observer be removed from the place, and try to convey that conception to another. Memory may retain every feature of the fficene. The idea may be complete. The problem is to communicate that idea to another mind. (1) Drawing.—This may be done by drawing. If so, the outlines of each object may be perfect. The shading may be an accurate representation of the gra¬dation of light on the natural objects. The relations of the parts may be exact. The perspective may be so true as to fulfill all the requirements of optical laws. Yet color and motion, the two vital elements of nature, must be wanting. (2) Painting.—In order to convey the idea still more fully, the observer may resort to the painter's brush. As before, outline, shade, perspective, relation of parts, are all true to nature, and now color enlivens the scene. The sky is warmed with the blush of dawn, *Thomson'e Outline of ad Laws of Thought. the grams and leaves are animated with their own green life, and the curling smoke of the cottage is no longer of the same hue with the cloud. Yet, on closer in¬spection, the incessant stir of natural life is wanting, there is no motion in tha scene. (3) sculpture.—Next the chisel of the sculptor chips the white dust from the marble, until the scene is evoked from its smooth surface, and stands out in relief. If now the painter adds color, the work com¬bines the skill of the draughtsman, the sculptor and the painter. Formal art has exhausted itself. Still there is no motion. That fisherman has been looking steadily into the water for months and years, and has caught nothing. It is as if a flood of liquid glass had suddenly crept over the scene, holding all in its crys¬talline death-grip. To represent a five minutes' view of the landscape would require a hundred pictures. Motion, the most ceaseless and admirable principle of all material existence, baffles the painter and sculptor, and time, the measure of motion, is beyond all the arts of pencil and chisel. (4) idangnage.—See now how Language airily lifts the foot to the step which Painting cannot touch with her longing finger-tips. Even Painting cannot express this idea "Missing thee I walk unseen On the dry, smooth-shaven green, To behold the wandering moon Biding near her highest noon, Like one that had been led astray, Through the heaven's wide pathless way And oft, as if her head she bowed, Stooping through a fleecy cloud." The poet has described a scene which the painter cannot represent. The painter may place the moon in the zenith, bursting through a maze of silvery mist, so that the active imagination might infer motion, but the motion itself, which language so easily expresses in "stooping as if her head she.bowed," defies all formal art. Restrictions of Formal Art Restrictions of Language